If anyone is tired of theater that only offers mindless escape to its
viewers, then I highly recommend rushing to the HERE Arts Center where James
Scruggs's stunning multimedia performance piece Disposable Men
demonstrates the socially transformative work that theater can do. Focusing
on the long and complex history of physical violence committed on African
American men, as well as the parallel narrative of stereotyped media
representations of black individuals, Disposable Men is not easy or
comforting theater in the least. The show's unflinching look at racism
points a finger at the audience and doesn't let anyone off the hook.

The brilliance of Scruggs's work, with its sharp direction by Kristin
Marting, stems from its carefully orchestrated use of video images and stock
footage from films that depicts the horrific treatment of African American
men at the hands of white perpetrators. The work opens with a prologue of
film clips in which the "Brother Always Dies First," while another video of
Scruggs makes wisecracking comments on the projected proceedings. The
grusomeness of these images, though made fun of by Scruggs, soon becomes
purposely overwhelming as the cinematic piling up of black male bodies
clearly reinforces the supposed "disposability" of African American men.

The rest of the evening focuses on a variety of abuses committed on the
bodies of black men: slavery, medical experimentation, incarceration,
minstrel shows, and outright murder. Scruggs wisely refrains from lecturing
to his audience and instead creates a series of vignette-like stories where
he takes on the guise of various characters. In one tale, Scruggs plays a
"lynch nigger" who works at a fictitious theme restaurant in New York called
Supremacy, where African Americans re-enact (for low wages of course) the
white "fantasy" of a pre-emancipation 1860s America. At Supremacy, violence
against blacks becomes a commercial venture where whites, while chowing down
on Southern food, can pay to have blacks "lynched" at their dinner tables.
Like the incisive outrageousness of Spike Lee's minstrel show satire
Bamboozled, Scruggs's work creates moments that are decidedly
uncomfortable as the show imperceptibly moves from comedy to tragedy,
forcing the audience to question their awkward bouts of laughter.

Scruggs's video design is pitch perfect and inventively utilizes a variety
of white surfaces (e.g. a KKK outfit, a blank photo album, white clothing)
onto which he projects his images of lynchings, minstrel shows, and cross
burnings. Some of the video is new footage, shot with NYC actors, but the
biggest impact comes from the use of stock footage, namely those clips that
show a bevy of film monsters (Frankenstein, King Kong, the Creature from the
Blue Lagoon) in an effort to highlight how African American men have been
dehumanized and literally persecuted by mobs of white people.

Disposable Men is a show that is incredibly visceral and refreshingly
in your face. Scruggs works to make the audience feel implicated at every
moment (particularly white audience members) by not letting viewers remain
as complacent observers behind the theater's fourth wall. He hands out props
to the audience throughout the play, forcing people to participate. In a
particularly startling move, Scruggs gives each member of the audience a
wooden gun with a laser beam attached while a video of a prerecorded
"policeman" instructs the audience when and how to fire their "weapons" on
Scruggs. With the audience poised to shoot, Scruggs takes on the role of
real-life victim Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black man who was killed by four
NYPD police officers who thought Diallo was a suspected rapist. As Scruggs's
policeman describes how "scared" he and his fellow officers were of Diallo
(despite Diallo's lack of a weapon), Scruggs's body soon becomes a virtual
target as the audience re-enacts with their laser beams the forty-one shots
that were inflicted upon Diallo. The gutsiness of this move on Scruggs's
behalf is estimable and I, for one, found it a scarily disturbing moment.

As if the piece couldn't become any more horrifically breathtaking, Scruggs
goes on to solicit from the audience the names of more black men who were
the victims of police violence and draws the outlines of those victims'
bodies on the theater floor. It is a shocking and moving image and one that
again forces the audience to wake up and take note. Though it is often
difficult for those of us who are white to truly experience and understand
what people of color have to deal with on a daily basis, Scruggs gives his
audience a moving and profound vantage point into the lives of the
frequently "hunted" and demonized African American man.

As a longtime fan of Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" manifesto, which
advocated physical in-your-face theater to shake up the audience and
instigate political action, I always wondered how one might actually carry
out Artaud's radical, but at times seemingly theatrically impractical ideas.
Scruggs's work is the closest manifestation that I've ever witnessed to
Artaud's call to action and for that reason alone, his work makes for
compelling and exciting theater. That Disposable Men is invested in
trying to remedy the long legacy of violence inflicted on African American
men makes the piece even more pressing and required viewing.